M. J.’s Reviews > The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America > Status Update

The book so far.

1. Society iss nix: an overview from the first comic strips and their working class appeal to the first superhero magazines (1939).

2. It was work: the rise of the comic book form, the dynamic of publishers, artists and writers is briefly explained; the first aesthetic critiques of the form, intellectuals underestimating popular culture and criticizing how easily digestible and innocuous the stories are; Eisner creates the Spirit, which is considered a deeper character with an adult appeal.

–From this point on the narrative gets more focused, the stories feel more coherently put together, topics weaved in a seamless manner, making it for a better reading experience–

3. Crime Pays: mostly about how Crime Does Not Pay (1942) came to be. Why is this mag important? It is considered the first comic in the crime genre, the fully formed model which would be copied by dozens of editors later. What was different about it? The stories were more detailed and the characters were better worked, there was a "psychological" approach to them. At the same time they were morally simple, criminals were bad and they were punished. Bob Wood was the artist, Charles Biro the editor, the comic was published under Lev Gleason's publisher, a socialist boss. Biro was a bad artist and not that good of writer, apparently he would sign scripts written by Virginia Hubbell, a writer he met at MJL (proto-Archie), he was a good editor though, that's my conclusion at least, also, Biro had a pet monkey.

4. Youth Crisis: The idea of post-war juvenile delinquency gains traction; William Moulton Marston is described as a psychosexual provocateur, a fallen academic and a sensationalist with pseudoscientific jargon, and I thought that was funny; Catholics are very angry as usual, they say comics are like nazism, fascism, anarchism and nihilism all at once; M. C. Gaines leaves All-American comics to create EC and publish his bible stories, he's insufferable and hates his son, William Gaines, who inherits his company after Gaines father dies (1947); the old generation clashes with the newer ones, juvenile delinquency is associated to crimes and moral panic ensues.

5. Puddles of blood: History of censorship in the US, overview of the most prominent anti-comics figures, from the academic aesthetes to religious figures (lots of them) and the infamous Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist with science-sounding ideas, a complicated person overall, hard to defend based on his opinions on women's liberation and homosexuality, but hard to vilify as well, based on his interest to correct the racial inequity of mental-health care; J. Edgar Hoover, FBI guy, was a moral agitator, spewing distorted facts on "juvenile delinquency"; the media starts associating violent crimes and comics; comic book artists are mostly oblivious to this scenario, Eisner is quoted on that.

–It's interesting to read about the censorship of popular media because it is an ever present question, comics obviously needed regulation in the 50s, I would give no child a copy of Crime Does Not Pay, but censorship was not the solution. How society and the government organize to regulate art and self expression is always a mix of atrocious opinions, moral panic and actual good points, and still, we never learn how to navigate it–

6. Then let us commit them: Kids burning books by proxy, or by themselves, a reminder that children are not immune to ideology, they will burn books if given the opportunity and the mindset, cases and cases of comic book burnings. This reads like a chapter from a dystopian books, Fahrenheit 451 etc; first attempt to self-censorship, a code was written by a few comic book publishers in 1948, the small ones mostly (including Will Gaines), inspired by the Hays code, the one used to censor Hollywood. It failed.